Ragged Lady. William Dean Howells
girl said to Mrs. Lander, politely, “You'll have to excuse me, now'm. I've got to go to motha.”
“So do!” said Mrs. Lander, and she was so taken by the girl's art and grace in getting to her feet and fading into the background of the hallway without visibly casting any detail of her raiment, that she was not aware of her husband's starting up the horse in time to stop him. They were fairly under way again, when she lamented, “What you doin', Albe't? Whe'e you goin'?”
“I'm goin' to South Middlemount. Didn't you want to?”
“Well, of all the men! Drivin' right off without waitin' to say thankye to the child, or take leave, or anything!”
“Seemed to me as if SHE took leave.”
“But she was comin' back! And I wanted to ask—”
“I guess you asked enough for one while. Ask the rest to-morra.”
Mrs. Lander was a woman who could often be thrown aside from an immediate purpose, by the suggestion of some remoter end, which had already, perhaps, intimated itself to her. She said, “That's true,” but by the time her husband had driven down one of the roads beyond the woods into open country, she was a quiver of intolerable curiosity. “Well, all I've got to say is that I sha'n't rest till I know all about 'em.”
“Find out when we get back to the hotel, I guess,” said her husband.
“No, I can't wait till I get back to the hotel. I want to know now. I want you should stop at the very fust house we come to. Dea'! The'e don't seem to be any houses, any moa.” She peered out around the side of the carry-all and scrutinized the landscape. “Hold on! No, yes it is, too! Whoa! Whoa! The'e's a man in that hay-field, now!”
She laid hold of the reins and pulled the horse to a stand. Mr. Lander looked round over his shoulder at her. “Hadn't you betta wait till you get within half a mile of the man?”
“Well, I want you should stop when you do git to him. Will you? I want to speak to him, and ask him all about those folks.”
“I didn't suppose you'd let me have much of a chance,” said her husband. When he came within easy hail of the man in the hay-field, he pulled up beside the meadow-wall, where the horse began to nibble the blackberry vines that overran it.
Mrs. Lander beckoned and called to the man, who had stopped pitching hay and now stood leaning on the handle of his fork. At the signs and sounds she made, he came actively forward to the road, bringing his fork with him. When he arrived within easy conversational distance, he planted the tines in the ground and braced himself at an opposite incline from the long smooth handle, and waited for Mrs. Lander to begin.
“Will you please tell us who those folks ah', livin' back there in the edge of the woods, in that new unfinished house?”
The man released his fork with one hand to stoop for a head of timothy that had escaped the scythe, and he put the stem of it between his teeth, where it moved up and down, and whipped fantastically about as he talked, before he answered, “You mean the Claxons?”
“I don't know what thei' name is.” Mrs. Lander repeated exactly what she had said.
The farmer said, “Long, red-headed man, kind of sickly-lookin'?”
“We didn't see the man—”
“Little woman, skinny-lookin; pootty tonguey?”
“We didn't see her, eitha; but I guess we hea'd her at the back of the house.”
“Lot o' children, about as big as pa'tridges, runnin' round in the bushes?”
“Yes! And a very pretty-appearing girl; about thi'teen or fou'teen, I should think.”
The farmer pulled his fork out of the ground, and planted it with his person at new slopes in the figure of a letter A, rather more upright than before. “Yes; it's them,” he said. “Ha'n't been in the neighbahood a great while, eitha. Up from down Po'tland way, some'res, I guess. Built that house last summer, as far as it's got, but I don't believe it's goin' to git much fa'tha.”
“Why, what's the matta?” demanded Mrs. Lander in an anguish of interest.
The man in the hay-field seemed to think it more dignified to include Lander in this inquiry, and he said with a glimmer of the eye for him, “Hea'd of do-nothin' folks?”
“Seen 'em, too,” answered Lander, comprehensively.
“Well, that a'n't Claxon's complaint exactly. He a'n't a do-nothin'; he's a do-everything. I guess it's about as bad.” Lander glimmered back at the man, but did not speak.
“Kind of a machinist down at the Mills, where he come from,” the farmer began again, and Mrs. Lander, eager not to be left out of the affair for a moment, interrupted:
“Yes, Yes! That's what the gul said.”
“But he don't seem to think't the i'on agreed with him, and now he's goin' in for wood. Well, he did have a kind of a foot-powa tu'nin' lathe, and tuned all sots o' things; cups, and bowls, and u'ns for fence-posts, and vases, and sleeve-buttons and little knick-knacks; but the place bunt down, here, a while back, and he's been huntin' round for wood, the whole winta long, to make canes out of for the summa-folks. Seems to think that the smell o' the wood, whether it's green or it's dry, is goin' to cure him, and he can't git too much of it.”
“Well, I believe it's so, Albe't!” cried Mrs. Lander, as if her husband had disputed the theory with his taciturn back. He made no other sign of controversy, and the man in the hay-field went on.
“I hea' he's goin' to put up a wind mill, back in an open place he's got, and use the powa for tu'nin', if he eva gits it up. But he don't seem to be in any great of a hurry, and they scrape along somehow. Wife takes in sewin' and the girl wo'ked at the Middlemount House last season. Whole fam'ly's got to tu'n in and help s'po't a man that can do everything.”
The farmer appealed with another humorous cast of his eye to Lander; but the old man tacitly refused to take any further part in the talk, which began to flourish apace, in question and answer, between his wife and the man in the hay-field. It seemed that the children had all inherited the father's smartness. The oldest boy could beat the nation at figures, and one of the young ones could draw anything you had a mind to. They were all clear up in their classes at school, and yet you might say they almost ran wild, between times. The oldest girl was a pretty-behaved little thing, but the man in the hay-field guessed there was not very much to her, compared with some of the boys. Any rate, she had not the name of being so smart at school. Good little thing, too, and kind of mothered the young ones.
Mrs. Lander, when she had wrung the last drop of information out of him, let him crawl back to his work, mentally flaccid, and let her husband drive on, but under a fire of conjecture and asseveration that was scarcely intermitted till they reached their hotel. That night she talked a long time about their afternoon's adventure before she allowed him to go to sleep. She said she must certainly see the child again; that they must drive down there in the morning, and ask her all about herself.
“Albe't,” she concluded; “I wish we had her to live with us. Yes, I do! I wonder if we could get her to. You know I always did want to adopt a baby.”
“You neva said so,” Mr. Lander opened his mouth almost for the first time, since the talk began.
“I didn't suppose you'd like it,” said his wife.
“Well, she a'n't a baby. I guess you'd find you had your hands full, takon' a half-grown gul like that to bring up.”
“I shouldn't be afraid any,” the wife declared. “She has just twined herself round my heat. I can't get her pretty looks out of my eyes. I know she's good.”
“We'll see how you feel about it in the morning.”
The old man began to wind his watch, and his wife seemed to take this for a sign that the incident was closed, for the present at least. He seldom talked, but there came times when he would not